How Long Can You Live without Food or Water?
More Articles Related to Food"How long can you live without food or water?" is a common question I receive here on Survival Topics. The How Long Can You Live Without Food and How Long Can You Live Without Water Survival Topics discuss going without for one or the other but only briefly touch on the limitations of going without both at the same time.
How long can you live without food and water is certainly an important survival question and understanding its answer can be of the greatest use when survival is at stake. If you know the answer and the reasons for it, you can make the most strategic survival decisions.
Basic survival decisions can often be based upon the Survival Topics article on the Rule of Three's.
Avoid Going Without Food or Water
Ideally the survivor has planned ahead and has a supply of survival food and water on hand. If not, in the majority of survival situations an adequate supply of water is often quite easy to find. Food is usually more difficult and more time and energy consuming to gather.
Without Food or Water
One of the most important things you need to understand in a survival situation is that having enough water to drink is far more important than having enough survival food. Although it is difficult to live without food for more than a day or so, many people have lived a month or more without anything to eat. Even when hungry, survivors are able to reasonably function and either extricate themselves from the survival situation or wait until help arrives.
However we cannot live without water for more than a week or ten days even in the most ideal conditions. Within a day or so of going with water your body will lose its efficiency to do work. Your thinking will become cloudy and you will be prone to injury. In a dehydrated state it is difficult to rescue yourself or provide the means to survive while awaiting rescue. Therefore water is the limiting factor in typical survival situations lasting more than several days.
Maximizing Survival Time without Food or Water
But there is more to know about living with food and water. If your water supply is limited, or may be limited in the near future, do not eat! The processing of food within the body requires large amounts of water. If you are not drinking enough water, water will be withdrawn from your body tissues to digest your food. The result: increased dehydration.
If you do not have water, do not eat food!
The only time food will be the limiting factor in how long you can survive is when you have an unlimited water supply, no food, and self extraction or rescue will take more than a month or more. This is a most unlikely survival scenario.
So the answer to the question “How Long can you live without food or water?” is actually boils down to the simpler question of how long can you can survive without water.
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I believe that you cannot live without food for more than 2 weeks. If you do not eat your body will basically begin to eat itself because you have given your body no nutrients.